454 
was first published, occasional contributions 
have been made to knowledge of the activ- 
ities displayed by various sub-human ani- 
mals, and during the last quarter of the 
nineteenth century_a science (which has 
been called the New Ethnology) has been 
organized to deal with the activities of 
mankind; yet singulariy little has been 
done in the way of tracing activital homol- 
ogies between the genus Homo and lower 
genera. It is indeed conventional for soci- 
ologists, and customary for comprehensive 
writers on anthropology, to instance the 
social habits of mammals and birds, and 
even of insects and infusoria, as analogous 
to human society ; one naturalist has gone 
so far as to study various mammals and 
birds in their activital aspects, thereby 
opening a most attractive field in science 
as well as in literature; but investigators 
have not turned seriously toward the ha- 
bitual activities displayed by the anthro- 
-poids—still less have comparative studies 
been made of the activities normal to both 
the higher quadrumana and the lower races 
-of mankind, albeit this is perhaps the most 
inviting field now open to research. Thus 
far this line of inquiry grovels in the stage 
.of travelers’ tales: the gorilla-hunter tells 
-how the family sire sleeps at the foot of a 
«tree in which mother and young are nested ; 
the naturalist in Liberia incidentally de- 
“scribes the use by monkeys of stick and 
-stone implements, while the Bornean tour- 
ist tells of the simian servant who prefers 
the society of human masters to that of his 
kin and discriminates among the garments 
- he is permitted to wear; but there is a 
woeful dearth of critical observation and a 
lamentable lack of judicious generalization 
pertaining to this promising meeting-ground 
of zoology and anthropology. So this as- 
pect, too, of the great question concerning 
man’s place in nature remains nearly as it 
was left by Huxley; the data are more 
abundant, and opinion has been both clari- 
SCIENCE. 
(N.S. Vou. XIII. No, 325. 
fied and diffused ; yet definite homologies 
remain practically unfound, if not un- 
sought, and the scattered facts have thrown 
little light on cause, less on sequence. 
Since Huxley’s prime, the New Eth- 
nology has arisen; and it has opened a 
vista of facts and relations which appar- 
ently escaped the keen vision of the pioneer 
in 1863—the vista embracing thought, with 
all the other psychic factors pertaining to 
the activities, sub-human as well as human. 
This vista is perhaps the broadest and 
most attractive ever opened by science: 
When Galileo descried the harmonious 
paths of the planets in a sun-centered sys- 
tem, he raised the minds of men to a new 
plane; when Newton grasped the idea of 
gravitation, he gave human thought a new 
hold on nature; when Darwin discerned 
the lines of specific development, he 
wrought a revolution in the world of in- 
tellect; but when students still living 
scanned the lines of activital development 
and realized that thought itself is bred by 
the very activities over which it comes 
later to hold dominion, they opened a new 
intellectual world—a world at once so 
novel and so commanding that some of the 
students themselves are fain to sit at the 
gate and view the prospect as fleeting 
phantasm rather than veritable reality. 
Nor is their hesitation either unprecedented 
or unpardonable: When the biologists of 
only one long generation ago unrolled the 
scroll picturing the origin and perpetuation 
of species through natural interactions, 
their interpretation seemed too simple to 
be true; when the anthropologists of the 
present generation unrolled a similar scroll 
picturing the origin of activities (arts, 
industries, laws, languages, doctrines) 
through natural interactions and self-de- 
veloped interrelations—and in this way 
alone,—their interpretation in turn seemed 
too simple to be true; and when the an- 
thropologists of the old century’s end (and 
